Language and Emotion: Sentiment Analysis of Donald Trump’s 2024 Victory Speech

Abstract

This dissertation examines the interplay of language, power, and emotion in the 2024 presidential victory speech of Donald Trump. It seeks to ascertain the phenomena of ideology and emotion in political language in relation to audience perception during the age of the internet. To this end, the research adopts a mixed methods approach to the speech, along with the emotional reactions it triggered on YouTube, employing Norman Fairclough’s model of Critical Discourse Analysis (CDA) and Robert Plutchik’s Wheel of Emotions. It scrutinizes the rhetoric of Trump’s speech, including emotional word choice, the “us” and “them” binary, and the repetition of phrases, which illustrate the center of populist discourse and argumentation. It depicts Trump as a moral defender of “ordinary Americans” against a “corrupt elite,” which intensifies the ideological warfare of the society.1,000 YouTube comments were examined to determine ‘audience sentiment’ in relation to emotional reaction and to identify the primary emotion expressed in each comment. The results demonstrated the predominant expressions of joy, trust, and anticipation, which are in line with Trump’s speech and populist rhetoric. Notably, a smaller but non-negligible percentage of comments included anger, sadness, and disgust, which indicates emotional and ideological polarization. The findings illustrate the expansion of political discourse from the speech, acted upon in a digital space, which has the power to amplify both supporting and opposing comments, creating an emotionally charged discourse.The study concludes that within current digital communication, exercising political power goes beyond the use of language to the feelings it triggers and disseminates on the Internet. By applying CDA to sentiment analysis, this research sheds light on the interrelation of emotive engagement, political populism, and emotional polarization in the digital sphere